1upt No So Cool

Jolly Rogerer said:
I have read that thread. Are you talking about memetic AI? It's an interesting concept, basically a learning AI that has some more interesting social applications as well. With a sufficient database a lot of number crunching could be eliminated in favor of these memes, which seem to be more or less dynamically derived heuristics. Developing these memes would require a capacity to initially number crunch a problem, or a lot of analysis of player behaviors that could be mimicked, or a lot of brute force experimentation by the AI. Or all of the above. It would be simpler of course when the game systems are themselves simpler.

Anyway, thanks for the interesting discussion.
Click to expand...

Exactly. The number crunching would be done early on. Once the AI has "learned," it merely executes that until it "learns" of a more efficient way to do it, which is basically a simple comparison of instructions.

There are way bigger brains than mine that have a better grasp on it than I do. I can only toss out theories as to how it could apply to Civ. I keep hoping one day that it will just click for me. I wish William Bull hadn't gotten swept away from the project. Man, you talk about a guy with a big brain. I had a few extensive conversations with that guy. His mind is put together completely different than most. He's on a completely different level. :)

I do get what you are saying about broken mechanics, too. The more I was talking about it with you, the more I was understanding where you were coming from. It's kind of like Jenga; when you pull out the wrong piece, everything around it comes toppling down. I guess there are some chicken/egg concepts in there after all. You can't have a good AI without a good game and you can't have a good game without a good AI. Both do become dependant on each other for the sake of the game, regardless of how they stand on their own.

But yes. Thanks for the conversation. :D
 
complaining about 1upt is basically admitting you suck at tactics and prefer spam style "combat" from civ4. Theres plenty of things wrong with civ5, but 1upt is NOT one of them. The "downsides" to 1upt with civilians not stacking is trivial and irrelevant.
 
I enjoyed 1upt at first. It was fun to have a catapult, two archers, a couple of spearmen and a horseman and try to use "real" battlefield tactics. However, the AI is too stupid to actually make it any interesting.

The AI could (and probably will) be greatly improved. But my biggest concern is what happens later in the game. There are units everywhere, blocking eachother. What concerns me is that Firaxis don't seem to have put a lot of thought into this: A few examples:

- Finally, roads costs maintainance, so that they cannot be spammed everywhere. This would have worked perfectly with the old combat system, but when almost every tile of your empire is covered with units, it doesn't make sense at all.

- The did a great job on making the maps look more realistic... Beautiful farms and fewer roads... Many of the early screenshots showed us a Civ paradise. In reality, of course, the maps never look that way. The player spams ugly circus tents in every available tile and covers them with units.

- One of those things I hated with Civ I is back: A single warrior can prevent the expansion of a great empire. The only way to deal with this is by starting a war. I thought it was absolutely brilliant that Civ IV let units from different Civs share a tile.

How they should have done it

- Let the player stack his units (wait, I'm not finished!). This would make the empire look nicer during peacetime and would make it a lot let tedious to move the troops around.

- Change the rules of combat. Make stacks extremely vulnerable. Let the attacker pick the weakest defender and cause collateral damage to all units in that tile. Let the defender gain bonuses from having units in nearby tiles. Let archers and catapults autmatically fire at attacking forces.

- Increase the unit upkeep. Make it really expensive to have a big army, especially one that is in enemy territory.

Conclusion: 1upt is a weak attempt to solve a problem that could have been solved in much more interesting ways. Instead of forcing the player to spread out the units, they could simply remove the advantages of stacking. Let the Civ IV player build his SoD's and watch them get annihilated, until he realises that stacking isn't a very good idea.
 
I love the new combat system, but I do agree there's a few annoyances, as mentioned ahead in this thread.

I'd suggest letting non-combat units stack, at least 2, but only allow one worker to work one tile as it is now. It would also be nice if you could be on the same hex as someone from other civ if you aren't at war with them, such that you could pass them even if you don't have enough movement to do it in one turn.

Embarkment is a nice way of being able to move around the map much easier with units. Don't really mind that they don't stack with defensive units. That means your escort needs to look ahead to keep transport safe.
 
uberdubersoldat said:
complaining about 1upt is basically admitting you suck at tactics and prefer spam style "combat" from civ4. Theres plenty of things wrong with civ5, but 1upt is NOT one of them. The "downsides" to 1upt with civilians not stacking is trivial and irrelevant.
Click to expand...

Err, no. First 1 upt makes for very tedious micro when you want to move an army. But it doesn't seem to bother you.

Second, and maybe most important, is you can snipe enemy capital cities with only 1/3 of the AI army in late game. Because AI units are spread all over his country, and he can't use them.

Don't mistake what I'm saying, I like to have tactical combat. But 1upt tactical combat is not appropriate to civ strategic map. It's all fine when you have 5 units, it's not when you have 100. But yes, it is not the biggest problem with Civ 5 at the moment.
 
Zogar said:
Second, and maybe most important, is you can snipe enemy capital cities with only 1/3 of the AI army in late game. Because AI units are spread all over his country, and he can't use them.
Click to expand...

As opposed to, let's say, simply walking in on an ungarrisoned city and taking it over without any resistance?

Err, no. First 1 upt makes for very tedious micro when you want to move an army. But it doesn't seem to bother you.
Click to expand...

This can be easily fixed if they add the ability to group, follow, and/or rally point. But really, it's not all that tedious.

I agree with your final assessment. There are bigger fish to fry.
 
Bad Brett said:
I enjoyed 1upt at first. It was fun to have a catapult, two archers, a couple of spearmen and a horseman and try to use "real" battlefield tactics. However, the AI is too stupid to actually make it any interesting.

The AI could (and probably will) be greatly improved. But my biggest concern is what happens later in the game. There are units everywhere, blocking eachother. What concerns me is that Firaxis don't seem to have put a lot of thought into this: A few examples:

- Finally, roads costs maintainance, so that they cannot be spammed everywhere. This would have worked perfectly with the old combat system, but when almost every tile of your empire is covered with units, it doesn't make sense at all.

- The did a great job on making the maps look more realistic... Beautiful farms and fewer roads... Many of the early screenshots showed us a Civ paradise. In reality, of course, the maps never look that way. The player spams ugly circus tents in every available tile and covers them with units.

- One of those things I hated with Civ I is back: A single warrior can prevent the expansion of a great empire. The only way to deal with this is by starting a war. I thought it was absolutely brilliant that Civ IV let units from different Civs share a tile.

How they should have done it

- Let the player stack his units (wait, I'm not finished!). This would make the empire look nicer during peacetime and would make it a lot let tedious to move the troops around.

- Change the rules of combat. Make stacks extremely vulnerable. Let the attacker pick the weakest defender and cause collateral damage to all units in that tile. Let the defender gain bonuses from having units in nearby tiles. Let archers and catapults autmatically fire at attacking forces.

- Increase the unit upkeep. Make it really expensive to have a big army, especially one that is in enemy territory.

Conclusion: 1upt is a weak attempt to solve a problem that could have been solved in much more interesting ways. Instead of forcing the player to spread out the units, they could simply remove the advantages of stacking. Let the Civ IV player build his SoD's and watch them get annihilated, until he realises that stacking isn't a very good idea.
Click to expand...

Completely agree with this.
 
uberdubersoldat said:
complaining about 1upt is basically admitting you suck at tactics and prefer spam style "combat" from civ4. Theres plenty of things wrong with civ5, but 1upt is NOT one of them. The "downsides" to 1upt with civilians not stacking is trivial and irrelevant.
Click to expand...

Completely agree with this.
 
^^1upt is a solution for the SoD uber alles of civ III/IV , but it brings it's own issues, mainly the clogging of more space-limited areas. I can think on better solutions, to be honest .
 
uberdubersoldat said:
complaining about 1upt is basically admitting you suck at tactics and prefer spam style "combat" from civ4. Theres plenty of things wrong with civ5, but 1upt is NOT one of them. The "downsides" to 1upt with civilians not stacking is trivial and irrelevant.
Click to expand...

You think that 1UPT as implemented in Civ5 is actually a measure of your skill in tactics?

:lol:
 
Polycrates said:
I think it's one of the best decisions they've ever made with the Civ series. And it's so core to the game that there's no way that they'll just patch it out.
If you really want multiple units per hex, Kael has made a mod that lets you do just that, it's in the mod forum.

On the other hand, I wouldn't mind if multiple (or at least two) non-combat units were able to share a hex. It would streamline worker movements quite nicely and I can't really see any particularly big tactical change it would make (assuming it still only allowed one worker to improve any given tile).
Click to expand...

Hmmm. Kael in my experience is brilliant and understands strategy gaming and Civ games far better than the original designers.

If Kael has already created a mod that changed this dynamic, then my guess is that it is that is not a very well implemented dynamic.

Stacking limits are quite common in good games. What seems to have happened here with the change from Cv4 to Civ5 is they go from one unrealistic, and unbalanced extreme: infinite stacking to the farthest possible point on the other end of the continnum: ONE unit per tile.

Why not some kind of middle ground? I'll go ahead and guess that is what Kael's mod does? Allow limited stacking?
 
Making stacks extremely vulnerable is not the answer either, or realistic. Despite the SOD issue's of previous CIV's, to me it was alot easier to swallow.

The whole thing that ruins it for me is that i am lookin at a hex, which represent dozens of square miles of land (or water). So to me, it sounds ridiculous that i can only put 1 militairy unit/type into that "zone". It makes perfect sence, in the scale of things, i can put a whole armygroup into that HEX; see it as a "Ardennes Offensive", where a WHOLE german Panzer army assaulted throug the ardennes, in CIV 5 game space, that would hardly be any bigger then ONE hex.

So point A: scaling sux now, with 1 upt

Then you have issue's with the current battle mechanics, you say; oke, let archers/cats/other ranged units give support fire, when a nearby unit is attacked. Sound cool, but hey, that aint fair either; the attacking unit could hav support fire unit near him also; shouldn't they fire then also ?
Or what about your archers, who only can fire- / walk fire and end turn (no more walking), and never can fire and run, only to be stalled at their position, hoping they don't get killed by some surviving Warriors, cause thats all the enemy needs, to finish off those archers...
Or Horses, with their uber charge, and run away skills; way too overpowered.

So Point B: Tacticall it LOOKS promesing, but if you take a good look; it's crap too.

Can people like it then ? Seems they does. Is it "more tactical" then ? Surely not, aldo some people DO get fooled.
 
Jharii said:
He's a codehead. He may have simply wanted to see if he could do it for any one of infinite reasons.
Click to expand...

While I might imagine Kael playing with the code for fun, based on my past experiences with him, and his work, I do not imagine him "making a mod," which is a far more involved process than simply "seeing if he could do it." I think Kael takes pride in his work and sincerely loves gaming. I don't see him just casually releasing a mod that he was just messing around with.
 
"Not so cool." Vast understatement. "Game-wrecking" is more accurate. Jed's commentary is good. Combat units maneuvering on a battlefield would not be able to "stack." Civ maps are not battlefields. They are large areas of land, and the fact that each tile can be completely different-desert next to forest-indicates that the tiles be thought of as regions. TACTICS occur on a battlefield. STRATEGY is mapped out (emphasis on that term). Civ is supposedly a strategy game. It is not a tactical game. The attempt to implement a tactical battlefield movement/combat system on the map of a strategic game is stunningly inane. It suggests that the designer/s simply did NOT know the difference between strategy and tactics. It might be unreasonable to expect the average person to have good definitions of these terms, but it is a perfectly reasonable expectation that someone designing conflict-oriented computer games should. What amazes me throughout life is the pendulum effect in most peoples' thought. It swings one way--all the way. And then it swings back--too far to the other extreme. Where is moderation? If a hex-based tactical system HAD to be grafted onto the latest version of Civ, then why on earth wasn't it made into a subgame, where strategic armies/stacks move across the tile/regional landscape with conflicts being resolved in a tactical subgame? I repeat; this has been done as of 15 years ago w/strategy games of the first generation. It can certainly be done now, and in a far more refined and workable way. Instead, in CiV, we have a design CHOICE/DECISION by the dev team to go w/1upt. Pendulum. And failure. (and possibly stupidity as well. I'd like to hear more from firaxis on this, but they're pretty quiet these days.)

The issue is only complicated and revealed by such silliness as archery ranges vs. gunpowder ranges and the patent and unarguable inability of the V AI to do anything effectively within the present system. Not even the most ardent attack dogs defend the poor showing of the combat AI. This is an absurdity of the highest order. At its most effective, the V AI creates the "carpet of doom." The pejorative nature of the term is obvious. The overall descriptive statement of the combat system is astonishing; "In a conflict-based computer game, the AI performs extraordinarily poorly." If this was any other company or game series, frankly, it wouldn't be such a surprise. I expected better design from a civ game. That is precisely what one pays for.

Thankfully, I avoided purchasing the thing. My sympathy to those who did, who now feel dissapointed, deceived, and angry. Hopefully, the pendulum will swing back toward efficiency and good design with VI.

I'll wait.
 
Peregrine said:
"Not so cool." Vast understatement. "Game-wrecking" is more accurate. Jed's commentary is good. Combat units maneuvering on a battlefield would not be able to "stack." Civ maps are not battlefields. They are large areas of land, and the fact that each tile can be completely different-desert next to forest-indicates that the tiles be thought of as regions. TACTICS occur on a battlefield. STRATEGY is mapped out (emphasis on that term). Civ is supposedly a strategy game. It is not a tactical game. The attempt to implement a tactical battlefield movement/combat system on the map of a strategic game is stunningly inane. It suggests that the designer/s simply did NOT know the difference between strategy and tactics. It might be unreasonable to expect the average person to have good definitions of these terms, but it is a perfectly reasonable expectation that someone designing conflict-oriented computer games should. What amazes me throughout life is the pendulum effect in most peoples' thought. It swings one way--all the way. And then it swings back--too far to the other extreme. Where is moderation? If a hex-based tactical system HAD to be grafted onto the latest version of Civ, then why on earth wasn't it made into a subgame, where strategic armies/stacks move across the tile/regional landscape with conflicts being resolved in a tactical subgame? I repeat; this has been done as of 15 years ago w/strategy games of the first generation. It can certainly be done now, and in a far more refined and workable way. Instead, in CiV, we have a design CHOICE/DECISION by the dev team to go w/1upt. Pendulum. And failure. (and possibly stupidity as well. I'd like to hear more from firaxis on this, but they're pretty quiet these days.)

The issue is only complicated and revealed by such silliness as archery ranges vs. gunpowder ranges and the patent and unarguable inability of the V AI to do anything effectively within the present system. Not even the most ardent attack dogs defend the poor showing of the combat AI. This is an absurdity of the highest order. At its most effective, the V AI creates the "carpet of doom." The pejorative nature of the term is obvious. The overall descriptive statement of the combat system is astonishing; "In a conflict-based computer game, the AI performs extraordinarily poorly." If this was any other company or game series, frankly, it wouldn't be such a surprise. I expected better design from a civ game. That is precisely what one pays for.

Thankfully, I avoided purchasing the thing. My sympathy to those who did, who now feel dissapointed, deceived, and angry. Hopefully, the pendulum will swing back toward efficiency and good design with VI.

I'll wait.
Click to expand...

Great post, I agree completely. My first wargame was "Midway" by Avalon Hill. I think it came out in about 1964. It had stacking on the "strategic" map and a tactical subgame, because individual ships do not operate over vast areas of the ocean alone, nor do they inhibit the ability of other ships to enter the same 100 square mile area. But when they do battle within that area it is useful to zoom in and provide a more realistic tactical combat.

Way to go Fireaxis. You finally introduce hexagons over 40 years after they became ubiquitous in wargames, but you revert to 1UPT over 40 years after it was made obsolete at almost every scale. Even Squad Leader had stacking for the love of god.
 
We've been having some very pretty wars. As Nebuchadnezzar, Babylon first conquered India with spear and bow, then found herself fixed between two great powers, the Japanese and the Russians. The Japanese attacked across land and along coastal waters with samurai and musket. Nebuchadnezzar fended them off with deft use of cannon and Babylonian Walls, saving the nearly completed Forbidden Palace in Delhi. But before the war was over, the Russians attacked with rifle and cannon. Nebuchadnezzar sued for peace with Japan on reasonable terms, and shifted forces across the continent. Lost a city with Babylonian Walls, but after a long period of war, finally captured it back.

At this point in history, the Japanese have captured Nebuchadnezzar's allied City State with the only source of oil on the whole of Pangaea. It's faraway, along Japan's coast, so Nebuchadnezzar is with his counselors planning a sea invasion.

As we said, some very pretty wars.
 
edit: Jediron, not sure what you mean. Obviously, your artillery is something you have to defend carefully. Which is very fitting for artillery.
Click to expand...
Yeah, right. And with the current 1 UPT model that is nearly impossible. In true warfare, the troops would defend the arty TO THE MAX, with everything they have. Do you really think a few horses could run "unharmed" through the gap (HEx...hahaha) . Really? Think again!

May i suggest you play a few games of Total War, to get a grip of what i am saying. My arty hardly EVER became overrun by the enemy, because i intercept his cavalry, with spears and/or own cavalry. The whole army is supporting each other in this. Tactics, that are IMPOSSIBLE to implement in a hexbased, 1 upt battlemap. Surreal battles, that's all you get. 100% handicapped by silly rules....

Have fun!
 
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